Better World
Providing clarity into an organization's work
We worked with a CMU college organization for 6 months to design, develop, and test a platform that improves clarity and accountability in organizations.
Timeline: October 2020-July 2021
Role: Project Manager, Tech Lead
Team: 4-7 members
Tools: Figma, React, Firebase
Timeline
October 2020-July 2021
Role
Project Manager
Tech Lead
Team
4-7 members
Tools
Figma, React,
Firebase
After interviewing over 25 members and leaders of various activist groups, we found that they faced a number of similar problems limiting their success.
Key Problems
Our Solution
All The Projects In One Place
Everyone On The Same Page
Stay up-to-date by seeing updates for each project. Respond to a help request to get started on a project. Quickly open documents from inside the site.
Overview
Context
We continued this project after the class ended with the goal of creating and testing a working MVP of the platform. At this point, our team consisted of a UX Researcher, a Developer, a UX Designer and me.
This project was split into two different rounds of research and design. The development of the MVP coincided with the second design stage. To see the final code, visit our github project page.
My Role
I coordinated the collaboration between our team and the activist group we worked with. I followed agile methodology and scrum to run multiple two-week sprints during the MVP development stage and created a product backlog.
I worked with one other developer to create an MVP of the platform in React, using firebase as the backend.
Focus Group Interviews
We explored how recent college graduates could potentially connect with their new local communities through collective activism and volunteering by conducted a generative research method called “New Metaphors" with 3 focus groups with 4-6 participants each.
Expert & User Interviews
We conducted interviews with 5 leaders of various college and local activist and grass-roots organizations and 20+ college age adults.
Literature Review
We collectively read 20 papers about how to promote community engagement and what leads to its decline.
Through synthesizing interviews with over 20 activist leaders and young adults, we found many members desire more engagement but need clearer guidance from leadership on how they can help.
Skip To Research 1We conducted a competitive analysis or community platforms, expanded our literature review, and ran a buy-a-feature user study to identify the greatest unmet needs our platform could address.
Literature Review
We expanded our literature review from the fall. We focused on how platforms are used by activists and how institutional knowledge is passed down in organizations.
Buy-A-Feature
We used a design exercise called “Buy-A-Feature” to figure out what to prioritize in our next version. We ‘gave’ 4 users a $500 budget and had them choose which features they’d ‘buy’ to include in our platform. The top choices were Role / Work designation, File Links, Schedule, and Slack integration
Competitive Analysis
We surveyed the landscape of different tools used by communities to see what features they offered and problems they addressed.
We found that no tool adequately addressed the unique challenges of college organizations involving turn-over and engagement.
Research 1
Discovering the Problems
We started with the broad goal of increasing civic engagement in young adults. Our initial idea was to help those who recently moved to a new city develop ties with their new community. Through the focus group interviews with individuals from our target demographic, we found that they were more focused on maintaining current relationships than forming new ones in their new community.
We then pivoted to focus on increasing the engagement of members already involved in activist groups. We conducted a literature review and 10 semi-structured interviews to better understand the barriers preventing increased engagement.
We explored how recent college graduates could potentially connect with their new local communities through collective activism and volunteering by conducting a generative research method called “New Metaphors" with 3 focus groups with 4-6 participants each.
Focus Group Interviews
We conducted interviews with 5 leaders of various college and local activist and grass-roots organizations and 20+ college age adults.
Expert & User Interviews
We collectively read 20 papers about how to promote community engagement and the factors leading to its decline.
Literature Review
Synthesis
I facilitated a research synthesis session where we analyzed our primary and secondary research and identified major themes. We added notes from all of the interviews and the literature review to a virtual whiteboard. We then sorted them by similar themes which we labeled (as shown below).
This synthesis exercise helped us unveil the underlying motivations and barriers behind member engagement.
What motivates members to stay engaged in activist groups?
- Social Connection
- Social Pressure
- Personal Validation
- Growth
Key Findings
Organization leaders often struggle in maintaining and enforcing structure within the organization.
They want to be flexible to accommodate the interests and capacities of their members but the lack of structure leads to either slow progress or the leaders spreading themselves too thin and getting burned out.
The three leaders we talked to believed that the main issue was capacity, but members told a different story.
Members are interested in greater involvement, but they want clear guidance and more accountability. They often feel lost, not knowing what is going on or where they can help.
They want to be in a place where it’s clear what is in progress and where their help would be valued. We attempted to make that place.
DESIGN 1
Designing A Virtual World
We first explored using “World Building'' to make progress clearer to see. We took inspiration from Habitica and Minecraft to add a physical manifestation of progress on top of a task management system.
Even though this approach showed promise, after 3 rounds of testing and trying to address the concerns of users, we decided to move away from the world-building aspect, primarily because of the following 2 problems:
Problem #1
Trouble Visualizing Progress
Our initial city landscape was defined as too ‘capitalistic’ so we moved to a nature scene which users liked better. Though they still felt it was disconnected from the actual work. Additionally, users had numerous concerns about how the value of tasks would be determined.
In our final version, we completely replaced the world building component, opting for a more basic representation of progress.
Problem #2
Trouble Managing Tasks
We found that many tasks in the organization don’t fit neatly into the Kan-Ban structured format. We initially added more fields to accommodate for the different use cases but this added complexity.
Later, we moved away from tasks and towards focusing on updates and resources. Our final version, therefore, removed tasks from the platform.
RESEARCH 2
Prioritizing “Jobs To Be Done”
I led a competitive analysis and facilitated a number of whiteboard sessions where we went through our research and clarified the core needs we are trying to address. We define these needs as two primary “jobs to be done:”
Our goals of this round of research were to prioritize our feature set to prepare for building out the MVP and to better understand where our platform could add value. Below are 3 methods we used to reach these goals.
Competitive Analysis
We analyzed the value propositions, feature sets, and approaches of over 20 community platforms. We found that most tools integrated with existing platforms like slack and google drive. Additionally, most targeted creators or marketers rather than organizations.
Buy-A-Feature
We used a design exercise called “Buy-A-Feature” to figure out what to prioritize in our next version. We ‘gave’ 4 users a $500 budget and had them choose which features they’d ‘buy’ to include in our platform.
The top choices were Role / Work designation, File Links, Schedule, and Slack integration
Literature Review II
We expanded our literature review from the fall. We focused on how platforms are used by activists and how institutional knowledge is passed down in organizations.
Key Findings
Members wanted more structure but they did not know how to create and maintain it without losing their flexibility and decentralized nature.
Through the Buy-A-Feature activity we found that members first wanted basic features, like displaying schedules and links, that would be easy for the members to stick with.
Tools like slack and google drive provide incredible flexibility but make it hard for members to know the status of current projects or look back at past ones.
Trello and Asana provide more structure about what needs to get done but aren’t designed for clarity across projects or lightweight enough to fit into many group’s routines.
DESIGN 2
An Organization HQ
Given these findings, we aimed to create a platform that was both flexible and provided clarity into the current and past work of the organization. We incorporated new ideas from our recent research into our redesign of the site and conducted another round of testing with the users.
Through a number of subsequent iterations and user feedback, we came up with the final working MVP with the following key features.
Through discussion with members, we learned that this organization was already using a “project ladder” (shown on the right) for major projects. They found the ladder extremely helpful for knowing who was doing what but had some difficulty maintaining it.
Our platform builds on this ladder structure and provides an easy way to connect updates to specific project sections and tasks. Additionally we integrate help requests and the ability to view google docs within the platform to increase clarity into what people are working on and what needs to be done.
“Seeing that iframe pop up with the drive right there and the responsibilities also right there was a very clever way of keeping track of all the tasks needed, so you don’t have to mess up the document. You are separating the research from the organization and planning, which is really helpful.”
“This seems like a pretty nice way to reflect on projects that have been completed. As opposed to just throwing it into the dust in a google drive folder. It could be useful to screen share that and show off what we’ve done.”
Outcome
Final Results/ Reflection
While we did create and test a working MVP of the platform with group members, we ended up not following through with a long-term user study of the group using the platform. We passed our work over to our project advisor, Geoff Kaufman at Carnegie Mellon so he can pass it on to a new group of students to take the project further.
Through this project, I learned how to work closely with users to co-design a solution. I also gained experience prioritizing features and translating figma designs to react.
What Next? Check Out My Other Work
